Dolphins Speak like Humans: Study (video)

Wisdom Quarterly, LiveScience.com, Xinhuanet

BEIJING - Dolphins do not whistle as previously thought. Instead, they "talk" like humans, according to a new study.

Dolphins use their noses to produce a different kind of tonal sound, just like humans do when speaking [particularly evident in Tonal Asian languages like Thai and Chinese], said Peter Madsen, the lead author of the study published in Royal Society Biology Letters.

Madsen studied how dolphins communicate by digitizing recordings made in 1977 of a 12-year-old male dolphin, which was made to breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen called heliox.

Scientists said humans breathing in a heliox sound like Donald Duck. According to Livescience.com, the heliox was meant to mimic conditions during a deep dive since it causes a shift up in frequency. However, when breathing in heliox, the dolphin continued to make the same sounds with the same frequency. More

Enslaved, trained dolphin takes part in an aquatic football match to entertain tourists at the Hefei Aquarium in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province in 2010 (Xinhua).

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish
Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
Dolphins have feelings. Dolphins rescue humans from sharks and shipwrecks. Dolphins prepare their meals. Dolphins name themselves.... It does not surprise us in the least. Is there anything these sea mammals do not do? But language is the exclusive domain of humans! So long as we believe only our brains can handle syntax, grammar, and linear retentive expression, just so long will we keep ourselves distinct from nature and its countless life forms. Animals already communicate. They already possess means of communicating exceeding ours. Extraterrestrial life forms, who gave us the languages we are so proud of as our exclusive evolutionary advantage, possess still higher and better forms of language. For instance, UFO vehicles communicate a tripartite language, and many animals can use symbols and signs. That dolphins use tones is hardly news to anyone who has interacted with these magical sea creatures.

Translating dolphin communication is possible!
PHOTOS: Gallery of Amazing Dolphins
The Amazon River Dolphin and a Baby Albino Dolphin
BOOK: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (HHGTTG)
VIDEO: Bizarre creature caught on video, Chupacabra?

Humans create dolphin simulating sea vehicle

The Chimp who Could Communicate (trailer)

Wisdom Quarterly
"Project Nim" NOW PLAYING

Can other primates communicate? Of course they can. As humans we want human-style communication and ignore how widespread and diverse communication is all around us -- between plants, between species, between sentient beings and inanimate objects, between dimensions, between modalities, between minds and hearts...

Is language uniquely human? Not at all. We originally got ours from "above" (space) and have developed and debased it into innumerable tongues ever since. (Sadly, they are being lost at an alarming rate!)

This world is not for humans alone; there are classes of unseen beings of a higher order here. There are also other very visible ones, who are less morally developed (as a general rule, not in every specific instance). And they can learn Sign Language and other ways of communicating.

A new documentary features Nim Chimpsky [a chimpanzee whose name mocks Noam Chomsky, who said it teaching it language could not be done because that was unique to humans] and what he was able to accomplish.

• Movie Review: "Project Nim: Monkeying Around With a Chimp" (LISTEN: "Fresh Air")
  

Bonobos are so genetically similar to us that it is not accurate to regard humans as a separate class. It may be that we are but another genetically-altered hominid or great ape group. However, attached and identifying with our bodies, we find it hard to bear this scientific possibility (mymodernmet.com).

A human-primate hybrid or a hoax? (snopes.com)

The Chimp That Learned Sign Language

(NPR, 2008) Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called "Project Nim."

• LISTEN

Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.

"Everyone knows that words are learned one at a time," but something happens when children begin to combine words and create true language, Terrace says. The question, he says, was, "Could Nim do this?" More

Other Primates Communicate, Too
"Koko the Talking Gorilla" (documentary)

(Tehinfidel) This documentary about Koko the talking gorilla is from 1978. It shows Koko and Washo working with Dr. Francine "Penny" Patterson using sign language and understanding the subtleties previously thought unique to humans.

• Betrayed by Science: the story of Nim Chimpsky
• VIDEO: Oliver the "Humanzee" (human-chimp)
• The Gorilla Foundation
• The Jane Goodall Institute
• The Death of Language (BBC)
• Bonobo Sex & Society: Challenging male supremacy
• Nim Chimpsky: The chimp who would be human
• World loses another language every two weeks
• Transhuman/Posthuman -- redefining evolution